


Death and the Maiden

by kailan



Category: Exalted
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-02-12
Updated: 2012-02-12
Packaged: 2017-10-31 00:49:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/338077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kailan/pseuds/kailan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Flash fics about the life of a ronin Sidereal, trapped in a dying city.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. sight unseen

It's so cold in the Palace of the Autocrat that Clare can see her breath, white wisps dissipating into nothingness with each exhalation as she cautiously weaves her way through the throng of people in the antechamber. She doesn't look to see if there are guards present. Anyone here will be mortal, and none of them will care enough to notice her. It's not just that she's a servant, though that's part of it. Normally servants are meant to be invisible. Forgettable.

But Clare isn't a normal servant.

She passes a procession of fussy, impatient bureaucrats, too full of their own inflated sense of importance to notice the pale lovely girl hurry past their tables. She slips past the courtiers, preoccupied with their false nervous smiles and their attempts to curry the favor of the Mask's representative. The nemissary's cold and haughty stare scans the room and misses her for lack of acknowledgement; no one is more important than himself and her magic encourages him to see and ignore. 

The throne room is awash with the various colors of fans opening and closing: the closely guarded court language that even now still holds sway in the chambers of the Puppet King (the only color left in the city). She weaves in and out of the throng like a thread making a pattern in a loom, but those who manage to catch a glimpse of the slender, unassuming figure forget her face moments after she is out of sight.

The girl takes a moment to pause at the entrance to the west wing. Starflecked forest-green eyes cautiously sweep her line of sight, probing the relative silence and darkness with predictive Charms before she skitters through the shadowed corridor like a mouse-

-and then she is gone, with only the echoing flutter of green satin hair-ribbons to mark her passing.


	2. taboo

_Step on a crack, you'll break your mother's back._

Clare still remembers that old rhyme.

It was something she heard as a child, a long time ago when the trellises in the Queen's Garden were still overrun with wisteria vine and their heady scent permeated the air. Most of the other children had taken it to heart, the way most people believed in Sextes Jylis' mercy or the story of Pasiap's mighty hammer that slew fourteen Anathema with a single sweep.

She hadn't believed it. She'd scoffed at their fear, because how silly was it to believe that resting your foot over the seam in a walkway for a span of seconds was going to bring you ill fortune?

 _You shouldn't do that,_ the other children had said. _It's bad luck._

 _I don't believe in luck,_ eight-year old Clare had said, and she'd danced across the cobbled walkways of the garden with her arms flung wide and her dress spinning, laughing aloud.

When she was nine, her mother had fallen ill. When she was twelve, the dead blotted out the sun and destroyed the garden, and the king's advisor opened the gates and let in the conquering armies of the dead and their smiling madmen, rewarded with the run of the palace and Aunt Lilia as his pet. 

Two days after her fifteenth birthday, she became an Anathema.

Clare doesn't step on cracks anymore.


	3. sifu

Teng Zu is the court astrologer. Kuntao used to hold that position until he betrayed the Autocrat to his death and became Wisdom Whispered, the Little Tyrant.

Now a dead man reads the Setesh Calendar in his place.

Zu's only function is to compile daily predictions for the city of Thorns proper. He is an irascible, short-tempered ghost of an ancient thaumaturge who died unexpectedly two centuries ago, of a massive stroke while carousing in a Guild brothel in Nexus. He habitually ridicules the court's military advisor, swears like a sailor, makes inappropriate passes at chambermaids, intimidates the city bureaucracy, and generally does nothing to dispel his reputation as the most unpleasant official in the Puppet Court. But for all that the ghost was a brilliant man in life - he studied his art in Yane for a time when he was young, or so he claims - and remains among the masters of his art even in death. To be relegated to a lowly position such as this one is an insult to his pride.

Clare is his apprentice, at his insistence. He noticed her despite her desire to be ignored because somehow the cranky old wastrel notices everything. Including her mistakes.

But because of him, she can read the stars of the Underworld. Aside from the smarting sting of a switch to the backside for minor infractions - and his tartly-phrased, unending criticism, liberally laced with ribald vulgarities - Clare actually rather enjoys working for him. In fact, a part of her takes comfort in it. If she's busy trying to concentrate on moving constellation positions relative to fixed in the Underworld's sky, she doesn't have time to bemoan her situation. Maybe Zu knows this or maybe not. Maybe he doesn't care.

She runs her fingers along the neatly creased parchment, smoothing it out, carefully notating positions and degrees and their meanings in certain combinations, because if she didn't do something to occupy her knowledge-thirsty mind, she'd go mad.


	4. lay your head down

"Beautiful sleeping baby.."

Sometimes Clare sings to herself, when Zu isn't around. She has a decent voice, nothing professional but enough to keep her company, and singing to herself passes the time almost as well as compiling horoscopes does. Often she does both.

"...when the leaves on the autumn trees all die..."

What a depressing song. This is a lullaby? A frown creases her brow and the song dwindles to silence, and she tries to hum it again but it's gone now. The snatch of melody that occurs to her now feels disjointed and out of place, so eventually she just gives up and by the time her master comes back from whatever errand he had been running, there is no more music in the air for him to scoff at.

She wonders distantly if there's anything like a restful sleep in the real world, and what it would be like if anyone sang lullabies to children when they grow up. Maybe it's something similar - maybe the same piece of music can't ever be heard the same way once you've seen it differently.

Clare tries to hum the song again, but it falls short and for the rest of the day she has only one line left, repeating in her head over and over again like a restless spirit that refuses to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Song lyrics from "Lay Your Head Down" are credited to Peter Bradley Adams.)


	5. the nature of secrets

The warmest room in the palace is a medium-sized bedchamber.

It lies tucked away in the palace's west wing, centered in a twisting maze of hallways, far removed from the bustle of court politics or the possibility of any brutality from the Thornguard or the Closed Fists. There are perhaps three people in all of Thorns who actually have any idea what is in that room. It's a well-kept secret, guarded by a fifteen-year old girl, a matter that Midnight Clarity reflects upon only for the briefest of moments before she raps her knuckles against the oak paneling.

"Mother?"

Without waiting for an answer, Clare lets herself in. The room is well-furnished, if dimly lit. A fire crackles softly in the hearth, lending a comfortingly familiar flicker to the kerosene lamps. The sunspheres which had once adorned the tables in their elegant jade fixtures were sold for money by Kuntao's men long ago.

She opens her mouth to speak, then stops, the words frozen before they touch her tongue. A rail-thin boy about her own age climbs to his feet while tucking small packets and various instruments into a satchel. He has well-defined, handsome features and strangely violet eyes, hair silvery white like the surface of the moon, skin the same pale cast as her own. Given time and a healthier atmosphere, he would be something close to beautiful.

"Inform me if that is not enough, Lady Sterre," he says to a figure in the veil-draped four poster bed, in a velvety tenor that causes Clare to catch her breath, just for a moment. There is something inhumanly lovely about it that she can't quite pinpoint. "Take one for fever. Three days' worth."

"I'll remember." The answer is a woman's hoarse, cracked whisper. "Thank you for your continued assistance, doctor."

"Not a doctor." Before he can turn to look at her she hurries through the open door, watching him with something bordering on fascination. She's seen him once or twice from a distance - she knows the court physician is rumored to be young, but she wasn't expecting him to be her own age. He slides past her on feet as silent as her own, bag in hand, and in the moment before she shuts the door she can see his bony shoulders slump with apparent exhaustion.

Clare kneels at her mother's bedside. Sterre lies wrapped in heavy blankets, shivering despite the warmth of the room and the cover, and the Sidereal feels a pang of worry newly refreshed - her mother has lost a terrifying amount of weight and her hair, once the same rich blue-black, is now brittle and thin, and streaked with white.

Gently her fingers brush her mother's cheek - hot and paper-dry. "Mama, it's me."

With what seemed like monumental effort, Sterre's eyes open. They are the one thing about her mother that has not changed - still a warm dark brown, glassy from her fever but alight with recognition. "Good evening, butterfly."

"Your fever is back."

"It comes and goes, you know that."

"It's not gone yet."

"Are you my mother or my child?"

Her mother is the one reason Clare remains in Thorns. Part of her knows she could simply slip away some night and no one would be the wiser. The other part knows she won't abandon her mother to die, only to be a ghost at the questionable mercy of a Deathlord. But her fear and her constant worry and her frustrated tears are a secret too, just like the direct path to her mother's rooms. Like the power that allows her to alter the fate of those things around her that possess such a thing, or swipe surface thoughts, or perceive probability, or read the stars with such ease. She can never allow her mother to suspect that anything is wrong. Sterre is an Immaculate. To know that her only child is one of the Anathema, and has been for nearly six months now, would kill her as surely as if someone plunged a dagger into Clare's heart.

So she lies. She laughs at her mother's joke, and smiles, and if she has any luck at all Sterre will never have to know anything of the burden that her daughter bears. And she watches with growing despair as the thread of her mother's destiny slowly unravels towards its Ending, inch by torturous inch.

For now, it is the only thing that she can do.


	6. the heart of darkness

It is the day that Thorns died, three years ago. 

Midnight Clarity is twelve years old. The sky rains blood, the earth screams and the dead have risen to walk the ash-choked streets. The Mask of Winters has besieged the Autocrat's Palace and trapped its rulers within: a glorious prison for the royal family, but a prison nonetheless. 

Clare holds a cool compress to her mother's fevered brow, shielding her with her own spindly body and forcing herself to look away from the bone shards and torrents of crimson shredding the Queen's Garden to ruins.  
She feels the bone-deep trembling coming from the woman in her arms and wonders if it is fear or the fever returning.

 _(and for years later the nightmares will wake up a Sidereal in the throes of night terrors. the autocrat a shriveled skeleton-doll on an iron throne puppeted on misty black strings. aunt lilia in chains kneeling before a smiling iron statue in a kept woman's robes. skies over the city black, green lightning forking angrily across the tortured clouds, blood pelting like rain into the flower garden)_

Worse by far than the noise and the darkness and the fear of death, and even her fear for her mother, is the helpless knowledge that there is no escape.

Father stands at the door, his face grim and his sword drawn. Hail made of bone shards clatters against the window panes and even through the thick film of blood dripping down the glass - much more viscous than mere water - she can see the clouds, black like ichor and a red-bruised sky.

_(she is always the only person in all of Thorns left living. she is an older self crumpled on the ground in a forest choked with dead trees beneath a blood-red moon, sobbing, her mother's dead body in her arms and a sparkling green party mask bracing her face.)_

The hollow pounding of the siege engine against the ancient black ash doors rumbles an echo into their ears.

"They will not be denied for long," the Queen of Thorns says. Aunt Lilia wears her courtly robes even in the midst of the fighting, and there is a hardness in her onyx eyes.

"Let it not be said that we surrendered without honor," Father says. 

In that instant the doors tear away from their hinges and tumble forward with a great crash, splintering benches and cracking marble before a wave of foul stink and deadly chill. Clare buries her face in her mother's shoulder. And when she dares to look at last, Aunt Lilia and her father have surrendered. The guardsmen lay dead on the floor and those who still live kneel upon the ground, defeated, swords taken by the conquerors.

A slender man in black, wearing a pair of odd-looking spectacles, makes his way towards the Queen of Thorns and her ragged entourage. He picks his way around the bodies as casually as if they were street blockades. Behind him follows a rotund little man with piglike black eyes and a sneer etched into his ugly face. Clare watches Lilia's eyes go flat with hatred.

"She's mine, Melody," the court astrologer says. "That was your master's agreement. I did my part."

"So you did, Kuntao."

"Wisdom Whispered," he snaps. "I told you before. It's Wisdom Whispered."

"Do be quiet." 

The stranger's reply is mild enough, but a faintly threatening note taints that smooth voice. Clare cringes as she feels those cold eyes pass over her: not a ghost but there is something terribly wrong with him. The air around him seems to shriek, as if the whole of Creation is in pain wherever he walks. He has done nothing but smile, and yet, he is even more frightening than the shambling horde behind him, or the black-cloaked skinriders that surround her and her family.

"Soldier?" he says. "The girl, if you would."

Cold fingers twist in a handful of her hair, black hair like her aunt's. Clare screams not in fear, but in creeping revulsion from the stink of preservative and the deathly chill from the thing's skin. It slaps her until she stops struggling. The stinging shock and the sharp pain of a tooth cutting into her cheek silences her instantly.

The man with the spectacles lifts a sword from the ground, tilting it this way and that. She watches him approach, bile rising as he draws nearer and nearer still. "Fine quality steel, wouldn't you say? From the Realm, of course. Your Empress does provide for her subjects, after her own fashion."

Out of the corner of her eye she sees her mother's face drain of all color.

"What a pretty little thing." He smiles at Clare, his fingertips caressing her cheek, warm as her father's hands had ever been. It surprises her. "So young. So unaware of how easily life can be taken away. Are you frightened?" 

He asks her the question as if there is no one else in the room except the two of them. His eyes are a deep reddish-brown and there is a hard shine in them that scares her. She wonders if someone could actually look like that and be sane but she knows better than to say so. 

His fingers squeeze her jaw, hard enough to bruise. She nods.

"Do you want to live?"

"Yes."

"Do you realize that I have the power to take your life from you if I wish? Right now? That you are powerless?"

"Yes," Clare whispers.

"Yet you do not beg or plead, or rage against the inevitable." He smiles. "An admirable acceptance of fate, from one so young. I approve."

The blade glitteres as he lifts it, catching the flicker of the torches. She feels her final cry build in her throat for a fleeting moment before it dies there, suffocated by her terror. Abruptly he pivots on one heel, and then a keening whistle cuts through the silence. 

Clare's mother lets out a thin, croaking moan before she loses consciousness, collapsing to the cold marble floor. Only Clare herself meets her father's stunned eyes for a fleeting moment before the light in them goes out, snuffed like a candle- 

-and his head tumbles from his shoulders in a spray of blood. 

And because she had known when the door opened that her father was going to die, she can't even find the will to scream.


End file.
